Social security is a topic young people perceive as distant — at best. Yet a significant part of the country's future depends on their pension awareness. With "INPS per i Giovani" (INPS for the Young) we tried to close this gap, and what we learned goes well beyond the specific case: it is a method for any institution that wants to build trust with younger generations.
A paradigm shift: from the service to the population
The starting point is a radical paradigm shift: moving from communicating individual services — an approach where users often see the offer but can't recognize its relevance, or lack the background to understand it concerns them — to building a dialogue with a specific population, identifying its needs and speaking its language.
We analyzed this population through multiple sources — national research reports on youth conditions — which returned a clear picture: a generation living with precariousness, apprehension and mistrust, but which asks to be listened to, oriented, and reassured about its future. We paired this analysis with direct listening, including with the students of the Master in Digital Strategy and Processes for Innovation at POLI.design, to understand how young people actually perceive the Institute and public language in general.
The discovery: it's not disinterest, it's linguistic distance
One thing emerged clearly from the research: the real obstacle is not a lack of interest or need, but of awareness and pension literacy. Many young people don't know that certain services exist or that they apply to them, and often lack the basics to understand the technical language of work and social security.
The information is there, but it doesn't "speak their language". We discovered that, first of all, they don't understand us — and our job is not to insist, but to translate.
A living system, not a campaign
Listening is at the center of the project, from the start and forever: the initiative is designed as a system that constantly measures and adapts itself. We closely monitor interactions — from portal traffic to the QR codes used in campaigns — to understand how young people reach the content and which paths they follow, and we collect qualitative feedback continuously. The approach is to have them tell us, at all times, how it's going and where to improve.
On this basis we built a dedicated language and experience, integrating design, UX and communication: a dedicated declination of the INPS identity with a fresher, more informal tone (using AI to refresh the visual components), personalized navigation paths, video content, clear and direct microcopy. And, in an almost unprecedented experiment for a public administration, we took the language of the young outside the web too: playing cards inspired by Pokémon and Magic that explain INPS services in a playful key — a cultural bridge between apparently distant worlds.
The rule: never imitate
The key point is simple and difficult at the same time: you must learn to speak the language of the new generations — more direct, informal, often visual. But there is a precise risk:
The solution is to involve young people themselves: let the message be conceived, translated and delivered by them, with their voice and their codes. This way, knowledge that was previously inaccessible becomes living matter, turned into clear and credible content through their mediation.
Trust is practiced, not declared
Before speaking, you must listen: ask young people what they need, what they can't manage to do, where they get stuck. "INPS per i Giovani" was born as a permanent laboratory of listening and translation — a way of building trust not by declaring it, but by practicing it.
And if we want experiences like this to become the norm of institutional communication, the condition is clear: put young people inside the process, not just inside the message.